Why do people dislike Dolphin?

[p.daniels]

I'm sorry, folks. Didn't realize HTML was on. Thx for the heads-up, Dotan!

On Monday November 3 2008 01:47:27 pm Herman Holmström wrote:
> Honestly. I've recently started using KDE instead of gnome, and I like
> Dolphin a lot more than Nautilus. I just don't understand why people think
> it's so bad. I mean, I'm no hardcore user. I want to be able to browse and
> move my files. Which pretty much any file manager does. I can understand if
> a file manager is utterly retarded and crashes and, well, just doesn't
> work. Why is it that so many hates Dolphin?

Well, I've tried to stay as clear of this little flamewar as possible, but 
since you asked so nicely, here you go.

The first thing you should know as regards my viewpoint here is that I use 
Krusader. I mean, if it's Dolphin vs. Konqueror vs. nothing else, I'll go with 
Konqueror, but I am a huge Krusader fan, it's everything I could possibly ask 
for in a file manager. So my comparisons here will be Dolphin vs. Krusader. If 
you're not familiar with Krusader, see the following (the first is their 
homepage, the second is a pretty good intro column):
http://www.krusader.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/krusader_one_file_manager_rule_them_all

0. Two-pane is the way, the truth, and the light. No, "split view" in Dolphin 
(or Konqueror for that matter) is not the same. A "real" two-pane file manager 
(also called an "orthodox file manager")... Here, see for yourself. --> 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_managers

1. Dolphin lacks the ability to treat compressed files as virtual directories, 
something I use all the time in Krusader. Double-click a tar.gz file (or a .zip 
or a .rar or...) in Krusader, it opens it like a directory. I don't need Ark, 
Krusader handles it.

2. Built in directory synchronisation rocks my socks off.

3. There is a command line right there at the bottom of the Krusader window, 
and if you need to perform more complex tasks, there is an embedded terminal 
emulator. Which means I don't need to fire up Konsole either.

4. Useractions.

5. Built-in preview, file view, and disk usage display. 

6. Krusader's search utility kicks Dolphin's butt. I can take a list of search 
results and make a virtual directory out of them which I can then manipulate 
like any other directory full of files.

7. smb, fish, and ftp shares are treated the same way, as virtual directories 
in the window. It's just like clicking into a folder, and that's how it ought 
to be.

8. Often when I am absolutely forced to use Dolphin (because now it's 
integrated with everything, isn't that great?!), it will simply refuse to 
start on my machine unless I start it two or three times (at which point that 
many instances of Dolphin will start at the same time).

8.5. Dolphin's slow. Slow to start, slow to use. (This is not a Dolphin vs. 
Krusader comparison, it's just plain slow.) Amazing that one could strip out 
so much functionality from a file manager and still manage to make it *slower* 
than the one it's supposedly replacing.

9. Embedded text editor. One more thing that Dolphin just doesn't have.

10. Frankly, and this is just my opinion on aesthetics, I think Dolphin looks 
like a Playskool version of a file manager. I can't take myself seriously using 
something like that.

11. Does Dolphin even have tabs yet? (The answer to this may be yes, I don't 
know.)

I could go on and on and on about this (and I do), and it might seem that most 
of the things I listed aren't so much "things I don't like about Dolphin" as 
they are "things I like about Krusader," but that's the point. I am used to 
having this functionality, and Dolphin does not provide it and totally never 
will. To me that makes it about half a file manager, and I just have seen no 
compelling reasons to use it.

No, "It's not that bad!" is not a compelling reason to use it. If one person 
on this list can name one thing that Dolphin can do that Krusader cannot, I'll 
eat my hat. I'll even give half-points for naming something Dolphin can do 
that Konqueror can't.

best wishes-
p.daniels
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